It won't be as bad as The Day After Tomorrow, but go outside at lunch and stand in the sun for 10 minutes. Then consider what another 8 to 20 degrees would feel like. That's where the various weather prediction computers say we should be by the end of the century.

Summer in Florida will become as unbearable as winter in Wisconsin.

This does not bode well for the economy. Think what happens to the theme park business when you add in the obesity epidemic. Imagine a walrus waiting in line for Tower of Terror if you added 20 degrees to July.

The coast is losing its beaches to the rising sea. Cities are battling one another for limited dollars and sand supplies in an increasingly futile effort to maintain them. Florida is a geologic submarine that submerges and surfaces as the ocean rises and falls.

The experts agree we will get hotter and smaller. They don't know if we will get wetter.

One computer projection says rainfall will stay about where it is now. So with more heat but no more water, the soil will dry out and we will turn into something akin to a parched African savanna. The brush fires of 1998 would be mild compared to what we may be in for in the future.

Another projection has rainfall picking up in Florida, turning us into a steam room.

Either way, the weather may get quite a bit nastier, with more droughts, storms and floods. Weather patterns are driven by the differences in temperatures between the ends of the Earth and its middle. Those differences will grow with global warming as the equator regions are projected to heat up more than the two poles.

Already data indicate these extreme weather patterns have begun.

Hopefully, this process will play out slowly so we can all adapt.

But there is a theory that melting ice caps could shut down the global ocean currents. These currents circulate warm water from the tropics to the North. If they stopped, temperatures in the northern United States and Europe could drop 10 degrees in a decade.

Temperatures to the south, however, would shoot up because those same ocean currents vent the heat that builds up down here. The result would be even bigger temperature differences between the poles and equator. That could really make for some nasty weather.

A Pentagon report called "An abrupt climate change scenario and its implication for United States National Security" says this could devastate agriculture and water supplies.

It talks about a massive correction of the world's population as people starve and kill one another fighting over dwindling resources. While an extreme scenario, the report says that the world's top scientists "have uncovered new evidence over the past decade suggesting that the plausibility of severe and rapid climate change is higher than most of the scientific community and perhaps all of the political community is prepared for."

It may be too late to stop this, even if we turn in our SUVs. So I may take the only available course of action left -- build a swimming pool.